V. THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS
HAVING realized, as a result of analyzing the dream of
Irma's injection, that the dream was the fulfillment of a wish, we were
immediately interested to ascertain whether we had thereby discovered a
general characteristic of dreams, and for the time being we put aside
every other scientific problem which may have suggested itself in the
course of the interpretation. Now that we have reached the goal on this
one path, we may turn back and select a new point of departure for
exploring dream-problems, even though we may for a time lose sight of the
theme of wish- fulfillment, which has still to be further considered.
Now that we are able, by applying our process of
interpretation, to detect a latent dream-content whose significance far
surpasses that of the manifest dream-content, we are naturally impelled to
return to the individual dream-problems, in order to see whether the
riddles and contradictions which seemed to elude us when we had only the
manifest content to work upon may not now be satisfactorily solved.
The opinions of previous writers on the relation of
dreams to waking life, and the origin of the material of dreams, have not
been given here. We may recall however three peculiarities of the memory
in dreams, which have been often noted, but never explained:
1. That the dream clearly prefers the impressions of
the last few days (Robert, Strumpell, Hildebrandt; also Weed-Hallam);
2. That it makes a selection in accordance with
principles other than those governing our waking memory, in that it
recalls not essential and important, but subordinate and disregarded
things;
3. That it has at its disposal the earliest impressions
of our childhood, and brings to light details from this period of life,
which, again, seem trivial to us, and which in waking life were believed
to have been long since forgotten. *
* It is evident that Robert's idea- that the dream is
intended to rid our memory of the useless impressions which it has
received during the day- is no longer tenable if indifferent memories of
our childhood appear in our dreams with some degree of frequency. We
should be obliged to conclude that our dreams generally perform their
prescribed task very inadequately.
These peculiarities in the dream's choice of material
have, of course, been observed by previous writers in the manifest dream-
content.
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